Central & Eastern Europe Archive

The results of Romania’s parliamentary elections earlier this month were thought to be something of a foregone conclusion, with a victory expected for the ruling center-right National Liberal Party, or PNL. However, record-low voter turnout of just 32 percent saw the leftist opposition pull off an upset, with the Social Democratic Party, or PSD, taking 30 percent of the vote to the PNL’s 25 percent. That makes the PSD the largest party in Parliament, with 110 seats in the lower house, though it will remain in the opposition, as the PNL have agreed to form a governing coalition with two […]

For the first time, an official from a former Soviet country has been named to a senior position at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Kairat Abdrakhmanov, a well-regarded diplomat who served as Kazakhstan’s foreign minister from 2016 until 2018, was appointed earlier this month as the OSCE’s new high commissioner for minorities. His job will be to protect the rights of ethnic minorities in the OSCE’s 57 member states—part of a broad commitment to protecting human rights that was enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which stabilized relations between the Soviet bloc and the West at the […]